The 1918 influenza (Spanish Flu) pandemic was the most severe pandemic in recent history. A third of the human race was affected by this avian H1N1 flu virus and roughly 15-20% of those infected died. Influenza viruses still claim the lives of over 50,000 Americans every year. This number could be reduced dramatically if everyone received their influenza vaccines every year. Improvements in health and science will hopefully prevent the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic from affecting far more individuals with a higher lethality rate. Vaccination, when possible, provides the best long-term defense against viral and bacterial infections and subsequently a pandemic, by preparing our body’s own infection defense system.
The types of vaccines, the methods of manufacture, and the safety profiles have improved dramatically since Edward Jenner first injected James Phillips in 1796. The time between the identification of the pathogen and the manufacture of a potential vaccine candidate has been reduced from years to weeks. Multiple platforms exist within our biopharmaceutical companies to provide several potential candidates for a commercial product.
Many of the cell culture-based biopharmaceutical manufacturing facilities in existence today lend themselves well to vaccine manufacturing, providing a huge potential for large scale manufacturing in response to a pandemic.
In addition to further discussing the history of vaccines, this webinar discusses manufacturing platforms for vaccines. Furthermore, when speed is of the essence like it is during a pandemic, there are opportunities to accelerate manufacturing; the webinar will outline a case study of how the equipment used in a typical mAb facility could be used for large-scale manufacturing of a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine.
Learn how to reconfigure what is available in your production arsenal and scale it safely while rapidly deploying it in a GMP compliant way takes a nimble and responsive team of experts.